Tower of Babel
|image = File:Tower of Babel.png |imagewidth = 250 |caption = The |Row 1 title = Age |Row 1 info = Bronze Age |Row 2 title = Construction Fee |Row 2 info = 50 Stone 10 Lumber 20 Marble 20 Dye 50 Wine |Row 3 title = Size |Row 3 info = 4x4 |Row 4 title = Bonus / Boost |Row 4 info = Population / Goods |Row 5 title = Other building |Row 5 info = Statue of Zeus}} The legendary Tower of Babel was supposed to be the ultimate masterpiece in ancient architecture. Had it really existed, it would have drawn in people from all corners of the earth. The Tower of Babel is a Great building from the Bronze Age. It increases population and produces a number of random goods from your current age every 24 hours. From Modern Era and onwards it produces double unrefined goods. Collaboration Rewards ''A little bit of History:'' The Tower of Babel forms the focus of a story told in the Book of Genesis of the Bible. According to the story, a united humanity of the generations following the Great Flood, speaking a single language and migrating from the east, came to the land of Shinar. The Tower of Babel has often been associated with known structures, notably the Etemenanki, a ziggurat dedicated to the Mesopotamian god Marduk by Nabopolassar, king of Babylonia (c. 610 BC). The Great Ziggurat of Babylon base was square (not round), 91 metres (300 ft) in height, and demolished by Alexander the Great. A Sumerian story with some similar elements is told in Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta. Historical References: The narrative of the city of Babel is recorded in Genesis 11:1-9. Everyone on earth spoke the same language. As people migrated from the east, they settled in the land of Shinar. People there sought to make bricks and build a city and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for themselves, so that they not be scattered over the world. God came down to look at the city and tower, and remarked that as one people with one language, nothing that they sought would be out of their reach. God went down and confounded their speech, so that they could not understand each other, and scattered them over the face of the earth, and they stopped building the city. Thus the city was called Babel. The phrase "Tower of Babel" doesn't appear in the Bible; it is always, "the city and its tower"or just "the city". "Babel" means the "Gate of God", from Akkadian bab-ilu , "Gate of God" (from bab "gate" + ilu "god")." According to the Bible, the city received the name "Babel" from the Hebrew word balal, meaning to jumble. Composition: Themes The story explains the confusion of tongues: variation in human language. The story's theme of competition between the Lord and humans appears elsewhere in Genesis, in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.5 The 1st-century Jewish interpretation found in Flavius Josephus explains the construction of the tower as a hubristic act of defiance against God ordered by the arrogant tyrant Nimrod. There have, however, been some contemporary challenges to this classical interpretation, with emphasis placed on the explicit motive of cultural and linguistic homogeneity mentioned in the narrative (v. 1, 4, 6).6 This reading of the text sees God's actions as not a punishment for pride but as an etiology of cultural differences, presenting Babel as the cradle of civilization. Genre The narrative of the tower of Babel (Genesis 11.1-9) is an etiology or explanation of a phenomenon. Etiologies are narratives that explain the origin of a custom, ritual, geographical feature, name, or other phenomenon. The story of the tower of Babel explains the origins of the multiplicity of languages. God was concerned that humans had too much freedom to do as they wished, so God brought into existence multiple languages. Thus, humans were divided into linguistic groups, unable to understand one another. Authorship and source criticism Tradition attributes the whole of the Pentateuch to Moses, however in the late 19th century, the documentary hypothesis was proposed by Julius Wellhausen. This hypothesis proposes four sources, J, E, P and D. Of these hypothetical sources, proponents suggest that this narrative comes from the J or "Yahwist source." The etiological nature of the narrative (see Genre above) is considered typical of J. In addition, the intentional word play regarding the city of Babel, and the noise of the people's "babbling," is found in the Hebrew words as easily as in English, and is considered typical of the "Yahwist source." Category:Bronze Age Category:Great Buildings